July 8 - 10th Annual - BRCS - National Cherry Festival Cleanup
Today dawned and looked like it would rain but we went for it.
17 of us braved the weather forecast and met at Hull Park.
We had people from the BRCS, TAPC, USCG, Bethlehem Lutheran Church
and the Goodwill Street Outreach and Cedar Mi. working together.
Everyone agreed that the river was cleaner than we have ever seen it.
The only reason I can come up with for this marked improvement in
the cleanliness of the downtown river section is that the many hundreds of
people who now paddle the section for recreation and "pub tourism"
have been better caretakers of our river than we have.
"paddle pub crawls". They have demonstrated that these events
can be carried out in a professional and Eco-freindly manner.
Even though the river was very clean, the homeless camps were not, so we
used our time to work to put them back to a natural state.
95% of the trash we removed was not from the banks but from homeless
abandoned camps used by homeless people along the river.
It is time to get a permanent place for these vulnerable people to sleep
which is out of the weather and out of the environment of which they
have problems being stewards.
The see all the photos from this trip look here:
I wish to thank all the volunteers who worked on the river and also
Jaquie Rossfeld of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church of Traverse City who
cooked us a great picnic lunch at the church.
Submitted by Norm Fred